A/N: This is my first fanfic and I hope everyone
likes it! Thanks to Drez for nagging me to send this in and all my friend
for reading it- you know who you are. A special thanks to my beta-reader
Zsenya for the wonderful advice and corrections.
Disclaimer: I own none of these characters,
they all belong to the wonderful JK J . I am not making a profit off
this story.
"A Picture is Worth
a Thousand Words"
"I GOT IT!" Yelled James one day
in the back of the History of Magic classroom, making Sirius and Peter
jump a foot in the air. The Marauders had all been asleep, with the exception
of Remus, who had been taking his usual notes. James had obviously come
across a stroke of brilliance in his sleep. The other three Marauders
turned their heads and looked at James with equal looks of puzzlement.
"What bout of rule breaking have
you come across that is so important as to awaken me from my usual two
o’clock nap?" asked Sirius menacingly as he cracked his knuckles.
"We’re going to do something no Gryffindor
has done before, and come to think of it, no person in their right mind
would do!" exclaimed James happily, as his eyes misted over and he sank
into a daydream of whatever he was planning.
"And what may that be, James?" asked
Sirius, breaking the silence and not bothering to keep his voice down
because Professor Binns would drone on no matter what. Even his own death
had not gotten in the way of his teaching.
"Breaking into the Slytherin common
room and get revenge on that git, Snape, for replacing my bicorn blood
with pumpkin juice, causing my Shrinking Potion to explode and melt my
cauldron during Potions last Friday. Of course." replied James very quickly,
full of excitement. He and Sirius broke into matching devilish grins.
Remus, on the other hand, launched
into the usual "All-the things-that-could-go-wrong-that-James-and Sirius-never-seem-to-think-of-until-it-is-too-late-and-we-wind-up-getting-detention-with-McGonagall"
lecture. "Well,
you have to cut me some slack, how could I think of all the bloody things
that could go wrong when I’m the only one who thinks of all the good pranks?"
said James conceitedly. Sirius let out a sputter of indignation.
"Snape did what at last Friday’s
Potions?" asked Peter. He had always been a bit slow on the uptake. That
was not helped by the fact that the Intelligence Charm James attempted
on him last month had backfired.
Remus filled Peter in as both Sirius
and James contented themselves with rolling their eyes behind Peter’s
back before they sank back into a deep sleep, both trying to dream up
the perfect way to torture Snape and all of his Slytherin friends as much
as possible. Long term jinxing had always been a specialty of James’,
and he smiled as he tried to decide on the best jinx.
~*~
That night during dinner, James was
about to inform the rest of the Marauders about his plan to get revenge
on Severus Snape, which he had planned perfectly during Transfiguration
class. He gave a meaningful glance towards the enchanted ceiling of Hogwarts.
In exchange for this, he received three dumbfound faces. The ceiling was
overcast, as though it could foretell the rule breaking that was going
to happen tonight.
"What do you get when you combine
Snape and a magical ceiling?" asked James.
Sirius responded, "An extremely
bad joke."
James closed his eyes and made
a face as though he was mortally offended. "No, no, no. You get the best
plan that I have come up with." By this time, Sirius looked very
interested, along with Remus and Peter. James lowered his voice. "Did
you ever read Hogwarts, A History?"
Remus had, of course, being the
studious student he was. Sirius couldn’t see what James was getting at,
and by the look on Peter’s face, he couldn’t either.
"Well, remember the chapter about
the enchanted ceiling in the Great Hall?"
"Of course, Godric Gryffindor
enchanted it with an Illuminociclus Charm so it would mimic the night
sky." responded Remus almost immediatly
"And what if we could perform
a charm that would mimic a certain picture of Snape’s bed with a pink
bunny rabbit on it that we are going to take tonight?"
"Brilliant, just brilliant James!
This is almost as good as the time we bewitched a suit of armor to follow
Snape around for a week after the Amazing Wet-Start No Heat Filibuster
Fireworks incident at the last Quidditch game," exclaimed Sirius as he
accidentally knocked over his pumpkin juice onto his Arithmancy book.
He did not even notice.
~*~
Before going back to the Gryffindor
common room, James stopped by the library to check out The Extremely
Difficult and Nastily Complicated Charms Book. Madam Pince eyed James
suspiciously because he never visited the library, and until now, she
had doubted that he even knew where it was in Hogwarts. When James arrived
back to the common room, he presented the book to the Marauders. The charm
was not very advanced, but it would be difficult to perform it on such
a large area. While the Marauders were deciding who should do the charm
work, Peter exclaimed, " Hogwarts has a library?" James, Sirius, and Remus
quickly turned their snickering into hacking coughs.
~*~
All four of the boys snuck out
of the common room under James’ invisibility cloak, which he had inherited
from his father. It was a tight squeeze trying to fit all of them under
it with out having any hands appearing to float in mid-air, but they succeeded.
They entered the Slytherin common
room through a secret passage they had learned about the year before.
This was not quite as simple as it sounded, you first had to perform an
extreamly complicated Alohomora spell on the statue of snake.The trip
to the Slytherin common room had been was quite uneventful, with the exception
of Peter’s foot getting trapped in the trick step on the stairs and having
to be pulled out by the other three. When they came to Snape’s bed and
removed the invisibility cloak, they received a nasty shock. Snape wasn’t
there.
"We can just take a picture with
the pink bunny in the bed. I mean, everyone will still know it is Snape’s
bed, with those foul black and orange sheets." While still muttering about
Snape’s bad taste in colors, James placed the bunny on the bed. Now this
pink bunny had been given to Sirius the past Christmas from his crazy
Aunt Lola, but Sirius was in denial, and a heated argument broke out over
the ownership of this particular stuffed animal.
"I do believe this is yours,
Sirius, I saw you sleeping with it just last week-"
"Poppycock," interrupted Sirius.
"It’s yours, I don’t even have an Aunt Lola!"
"Oh give up, or I’ll tell Snape
about that time your tried to get a house elf to pass as your girlfriend
to win that bet…" That shut Sirius up pretty quick, but not before waking
the entire Slytherin dormitory.
The Slytherins had heard enough
to guess who the intruders were, and by the time they sat up, James had
bolted, followed by Sirius, Remus, and Peter at the tail end after they
quickly took the picture. They rushed down the stairs, out of the common
room, and down the hall. They hid behind a particularly large suit of
armor and pulled the invisibility cloak over their panting selves.
"This is going well- isn’t it
James? At least we’re not about to be caught by Filch this time. I really
do prefer this scenario of being chased by a bunch of sleep deprived Slytherins-
don’t you?" hissed Sirius into James’ ear quietly, but still sounding
threatening.
James ignored the sarcasm in
Sirius’s voice and replied scathingly, "You better keep quiet, you git,
or I’ll tell Remus, Peter, and the Slytherin seventh years about
you modeling Muggle women’s clothes for Muggle Studies last year." James
had always been much smaller than Sirius, but he made up for it in his
"own unique ways," as he put it.
"Excuse me Sirius, but what did
you do?" asked Remus, positively beaming with interest (he didn’t
take Muggle Studies with Sirius and James).
"Oh stuff a sock down your throat!"
Remus looked taken aback by Sirius’s
remark but swiftly recovered with a fit of coughing that had a suspicious
and uncanny resemblance to "I, Sirius, love Snape."
Sirius shot Remus a look that
was quite reminiscent to Professor McGonagall after they transformed her
shoes into grindylows last week. Quietly, they tiptoed to the Great Hall
to perform the Illuminociclus Charm and Peter walked slowly after them.
~*~
None of the Marauders slept well
that night; they were all to busy trying to imagine Snape’s face at breakfast.
As they were entering the Great Hall the next morning, they found out
that the reason Snape wasn’t in his bed, he had tried to break into their
dormitory to jinx them, but thankfully, he had been unsuccessful, heightening
the Marauder’s good mood even more.
The look on Snape’s face as it
dawned on him that it was his bed pictured on the ceiling of the Great
Hall was priceless, and as Sirius had put it, a picture would be worth
way more than a thousand words.
